The Maya SDK is no better. Excruciating teeth-pulling experience to do really basic things as concepts are not explained, or explained well. Every node is purpose-built and has it's own secret handshakes to use making it difficult to write generalized and reusable code to perform common tasks. Using the SDK basically involves studying the graph as seen in the node editor, dissecting how it was built, then repeating it in your code...only to find out even if you replicate the exact same setup it doesn't behave the same. There are additional hidden tricks you must know to get those last pieces to drop into place. You can very easily fall into the trap of attempting to write your own abstraction layer just to make the pieces less cumbersome to use, but just when you think you've wrapped everything nicely, Maya throws you one of it's endless supply of idiosyncratic surprises.
Example: constraints In softimage, each constraint is a separate operator that lives in an object's construction history. Every time you add a constraint, it is added to the construction history in the order which it was applied. A lot more may be going on under the hood, but to the end user it's very straight forward. In Maya, if you attempt to add more than one of the same type of constraint to an object (e.g. two point constraints), instead of making two distinct constraint operator nodes like in Softimage, Maya consolidates them into a single constraint node with multiple inputs blended internally - but you have to supply your own blendweight slider to do that (they don't mention that in the SDK docs). Since each constraint type has slightly different inputs and outputs, you write your own abstraction layer to handle the differences, only to discover that if two different types of constraints affecting the same attribute of an object are applied (e.g. point and parent constraint competing for the 'position' attribute), Maya throws the curve ball of inserting a 'pairBlend' node, which is like mix2colors node, but for transforms instead of colors. Great. Now you must revise your logic in your abstraction layer to account for that. Then you start testing again applying a point constraint, then a parent constraint, then another type of constraint which also competes for the position attribute....only to discover Maya now removes the pairBlend node and rearranges the constraints into an entirely different arrangement you cannot predict. This is why Maya will always suck. Probably also explains why a lot of the C++ sample code I see wraps MEL commands instead of digging into the dependency graph. I haven't followed Maya development, but from a distance it appears they're focusing on revamping the underlying core right now and will worry about the UI later. However, given the idiosyncratic framework, I honestly don't see a slick and user friendly UI (a la Softimage forthcoming) at any point in time. The way Maya is (currently) built won't allow it. In short, they weren't thinking. Matt Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2017 09:41:26 -0700 From: Meng-Yang Lu <[email protected]> Subject: Re: What were they thinking.... To: "Official Softimage Users Mailing List. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/xsi_list"; The copy and paste is pretty bad. Haven't done it in years because of the PTSD, but I remembered it would put "__pasted__" on the names of the objects that were pasted over, assuming you wanted to do that in the first place. It's not a finely-tuned generalist tool like Softimage is out of the box. And before, you could forgive it's shortcomings because in the Motif UI days, it was ugly, but stupid fast. Hotbox, plus marking menus, plus hotkeys made you fast. Now the UI lag pretty much sapped the joy from those UI features. Maya has had a tough time adapting to the times. I see other developers more in-tuned with the day to day tasks of production and developing tools that help artists get through their day. Not sure why ADSK can't move the needle in a meaningful way when it comes to Maya releases. I feel like they should go and buy new computers, install maya out of the box, and try to put together a 3 min short film. The pitfalls would be pretty obvious imo. peace, -Lu ------ Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to [email protected] with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
